With the increasing economic and cultural globalization, expectations have been raised for speech translation systems which support communication between people having different mother tongues. Such a speech translation system receives a speech in one language given by a first user to translate the speech into data in another language by speech recognition processing and machine translation processing. The speech translation system then presents a result of the translation to a second user in the form of a text or a speech. The speech translation system is utilized as, for example, an interpretation apparatus at an information counter.
In connection with the above-described speech translation system, translation apparatus is known which stores a second user's response (speech) to a first user's speech in association with the first user's speech and which predicts and presents the next speeches. By predicting and presenting the next speeches and allowing the user to select from the speeches, the translation apparatus reduces burdens on the user resulting from dialogs in different languages. To further reduce the burdens on the user, a translation apparatus has been desired which automatically answers the user's questions.